Guns N' Roses

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Use Your Illusion I (Deluxe Edition)
    Use Your Illusion I (Deluxe Edition)
    Use Your Illusion I (Deluxe Edition)

    2022

  • Use Your Illusion II (Deluxe Edition)
    Use Your Illusion II (Deluxe Edition)
    Use Your Illusion II (Deluxe Edition)

    A few months after the release of Guns N’ Roses’ debut album, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction, went platinum, Axl Rose gave an interview in which he described a piano ballad he’d been working on called “November Rain”. By that point, the band knew it well: They’d recorded a demo of it nearly a year before starting Appetite, and their guitarist, Slash, remembers an even earlier version that had expanded to 18 minutes. The song seemed to torture Rose—or, at least, represented an ideal he was obsessed with bringing to life. If he didn’t get it right, he told the interviewer, he’d quit music. The best comparison for 1991’s Use Your Illusion I and its fraternal twin, Use Your Illusion II, isn’t music, but film. The budget, the combined two-hour runtime, the scale, the fact that the band were almost never in the same room at the same time: This isn’t music captured, but music built—piece by audacious piece. Riki Rachtman, a former MTV personality and friend of the band, joked that the moment he knew they’d changed for good was during the last sequence of the video for “Estranged”, in which Axl not only jumps off an aircraft carrier into the ocean, but follows it with a sequence of him swimming with dolphins. This, though, is where Rose’s head was at, and what Use Your Illusion represents: not the spontaneity of bar bands, but the methodical grandeur of blockbusters. The climactic held vocal note of “Don’t Cry”—nearly 30 seconds, twisting in the spotlight—confirms what some listeners probably already figured out: Rose dreamed of opera. He later said he didn’t just want to outdo their debut, but bury it. And in a way, Use Your Illusion is an even scarier effort: tender one minute (“November Rain”, “Dead Horse”) and cruel the next (“Back Off Bitch”, “Bad Obsession”), an exercise in emotional whiplash that verges on the psychopathic. But even by the band’s own standards, it was vicious: Where Appetite talks about addiction with a sense of swagger or double entendre (“Nightrain”, “Mr. Brownstone”), Use Your Illusion offers a 10-minute death fantasy called “Coma”; where Appetite is “feel my serpentine” (“Welcome to the Jungle”), Use Your Illusion is “suck my fucking dick” (“Get in the Ring”). Of the two volumes, the second is weirder and more adventurous. Slash once compared the entire project to The Beatles’ White Album (only not as good, he genuflected), but the experience is more like The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St.: sprawling, dislocated, less about any single song than the rollercoaster-like effect of the larger picture. And as massive as its impact was on the shape of ’90s rock, there are elements of the albums—and II, especially—that resonate even more closely with gangsta rap: the cinematic scope (“Civil War”), the mix of nostalgia and sentimentality (“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”) with almost paranoiac meanness (“You Could Be Mine”). Both of its volumes seeing release on the same day, Use Your Illusion came out at a time when a wave of underground bands was redefining mainstream rock by trading grandiosity for modesty. But 1991 also marked the death of Freddie Mercury and, by extension, the end of Queen as we often remember them. The coincidence is poetic: As Nirvana and their peers largely eschewed rock’s taste for spectacle, G N' R embodied it. Like a fading starlet leaning into a nervous breakdown, Axl preens for the camera, knowing it won’t look away.

  • Appetite for Destruction
    Appetite for Destruction
    Appetite for Destruction

    100 Best Albums Early on in the history of Guns N’ Roses, Axl Rose was driving around with his friend Michelle when Elton John’s “Your Song” came on the radio. Gee, Michelle said, I wish someone would write a song that beautiful about me. So, Axl went home and tried. The first draft didn’t sit right—it was too reductive, too romantic, too much like a song—so he started over: “Your daddy works in porno now that mommy’s not around/She used to love her heroin, but now she’s underground” (“My Michelle”). Yeah, it was bracing, Michelle said. But it was the truth.  It isn’t just that Appetite is mean—though it is. It’s that it never flinches at how it feels, no matter how ugly. The drug songs aren’t about getting high, they’re about blacking out (“Mr. Brownstone”, “Nightrain”). The sex songs don’t relish the physical act so much as the power that comes with it (“Anything Goes”). When they give you an anthem, it’s against a backdrop of filth and misery (“Paradise City”). And when they give you a ballad, it’s with the paranoid sense that nothing so pure could actually be real (the dark outro of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”). Conquering their conquests isn’t enough: They want to degrade them and trade high-fives about it later (“It’s So Easy”). At the time, the band was considered an antidote to the slickness of pop-metal—something like The Rolling Stones to the early ’60s. But a better comparison is the Sex Pistols: rude, fearless, unencumbered by metaphor. Some bands make sloppiness sound liberating; Guns N’ Roses make it sound menacing, the howl of something unstable and sleepless. The album famously ends on a happy note: “Don’t ever leave me, say you’ll always be there/All I ever wanted was for you to know that I care” (“Rocket Queen”). But only a few bars earlier, it just as famously captured the sounds of Axl and a stripper having sex in the studio. Appetite bears its crumbs of hope, but it puts you through hell to get them.

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About Guns N' Roses

The qualities that make Guns N’ Roses so divisive—the public altercations, the controversial outbursts, the scandalous decadence—are also the things that make them so captivating. After all, rock fans passionately embraced the collision of ’70s hard rock, heavy metal and punk captured on GNR’s 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction, precisely because it exuded a gritty, dangerous vibe light years removed from the glossy hair bands of the day. “Welcome to the Jungle” may be a fantastic air-guitar jam, yet it is also an enraged dispatch from the seedy back alleys of the American Dream. Even “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, an uplifting ballad at first, ultimately drowns in singer Axl Rose’s self-doubt. It was only natural, then, that stardom would prove tumultuous for a fast-living GNR who rode wave upon wave of controversy and turmoil. Yet they only grew more ambitious. While Slash still unloads plenty of Stonesy riffs on 1991’s Use Your Illusion I and II, the albums’ cornerstones are epic psychodramas such as “November Rain” that reflect Rose’s love of Queen’s grandiosity. Another album of original material wouldn’t surface until 2008’s Chinese Democracy. By then, however, GNR essentially was a solo project for Rose, who made a hard turn into seething industrial rock. With hopes for any kind of reunion of the original lineup all but extinguished, Slash and bassist Duff McKagan shocked fans by announcing their return to the fold in 2016. In addition to headlining Coachella, they embarked on a world tour that became one of the highest grossing of the decade, a fact that speaks to GNR’s legacy as one of the most popular, if also most contentious, bands in the entire history of rock.

ORIGIN
Los Angeles, CA, United States
FORMED
March 1985
GENRE
Hard Rock

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